How to Teach the Passive Voice
I’m writing this for an English teacher in France. I’ve never met her and I’ve decided not to ask her name, but one of her students is coming to me for private lessons. « Pierre » is in the seventh grade, which, officially, in France would be his second year of English lessons. But in
Transitioning to Teaching Languages with Comprehensible Input
Teachers often discover CI after several years, even many many years, of using other methods. Old habits are hard to break. A question that often comes up s how to transition from former methods to one that stresses Comprehensible Input. Where to find help?
Listen!!! Then Listen Some More! Then Listen Again!
There is an urgent need for better ways to teach students to listen. While we all know that listening is one of the four focal skills, in my own opinion it is both the most essential and the most neglected. Teachers who privilege Comprehensible Input know that students have to be either listening or reading
What is Comprehensible Input?
More and more foreign language teachers are talking about Comprehensible Input. Here I try to answer the most common questions teachers ask
Error correction …. or not?
Animal trainers know that it is easier to teach a horse or dog what you want it to do, than to teach it not to do something. “No” is an abstract notion. In the same way, it is much easier to teach students what is right than it is to teach them not to do
How do you teach Grammar?
The short answer is: We don’t. How do you know that “He goed” is not grammatically correct? At some point in their infancy, most children will say “He goed”. Then they stop saying it, long before a school teacher tells them that it is not good grammar. Good grammar, like vocabulary, is acquired before it
What is CI?
TPRS is doing what people have been doing ever since the Tower of Babel: communicating with others using simple, comprehensible vocabulary in the context of a story.
Planned but not targeted: The Arrival by Shaun Tan
Many students have been so enchanted by the book and its drawings that they have bought their own copy.
Looking Back at Agen 2019 … Looking Forward to 2020 … Ooops! … 2022? 2023
This post was written in August 2019, long before we realized that it would be impossible to hold the conference in Agen in 2020. We then went on-line with the help of Karen Rowan and over 300 teachers registered for the on-line conference. In 2021 it seemed to me that, in spite of the success